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This article was first published on the 1st of January, 2015 and last updated on the 23rd of April, 2016 by Patrick Carpen.

Front Cover of the book “The Secret”

Sometime around the year 2006, a bestselling book and blockbuster movie hit the scenes and took the world by “storm”. It is called “The Secret” and was written primarily by a woman named Rhonda Byrne from Australia. The Secret sold millions of copies in hundreds of languages, and the producers of The Secret claimed that “this is the generation of the world that will make the greatest difference in the history of mankind.” According to the book and movie, The Secret that was once only available to a reserved 1% of the world’s population is now in the hands of almost everyone. Ironically, there hasn’t been noted any extraordinary improvement in human advancement since the release of the book in 2006 to now.

Ms. Byrne spoke about the troubles she encountered in life, and then, at the turning point, while reading a book her daughter gave her as a gift, called “think and grow rich”, an idea suddenly hit her. She had stumbled upon “the secret”.

I remembered when I was studying literature for my high schools exams, I read a poem that went something like “two girls discovered the secret of the life in a single line of poetry.” Now that’s totally irrelevant, so coming back to the point, in this case, it was “one woman” who discovered the secret of life in a classic book of literature.

According to the avatars of The Secret, since the beginning of time, a select few people where gifted or lucky enough to know or learn the “secret of life”, that is, the secret force which can be harnessed by a person to control the world around him or her. According to her, this secret force is the “thought”: whatever you think about, you bring about.

According to the book and movie, called The Secret, the universe reads all your thoughts and delivers things and circumstances which correspond with those thoughts. Happy, joyful thoughts correspond with good things. Pessimistic, sad, and fearful thoughts correspond with negative things. In a nutshell, if you fear something for a very long time, eventually, depending on the amount of thought you put into it, it will manifest just because of the fear. You will attract what you fear. On the other hand, if you are excited and truly believe that you will receive something good, you will attract that too, and it will be yours. They call it the law of attraction. The Secret also speaks about vibration frequencies. Happy, grateful and joyful people vibrate at a frequency which attracts all good things into their lives. Pessimistic, fearful and “negative” people vibrate at a frequency which attracts all bad things into their lives. The solution to life’s problems? Think positive, and all positive things will come to you. Your life will reach the pinnacle of joy, prosperity and fulfillment.

The Secret, according to Rhoda Byrne and her cohorts, gives you everything: wealth, health, joy, happiness….And using this secret, a select few people throughout the history of the world have been able to live lives of luxury and happiness. The doctrines of The Secret rule God completely out of the all equations, and use the word “universe” in places where God could have been used.

Major Flaw: By the law of natural selection, only 1 to 10 percent of the world’s population was supposed to learn about this Great Secret. The writers of “The Secret” themselves admit this, as they put it, “…it’s always a select group of people…it has been set up this way”. However this “Secret Book” has made it into the hands of the masses: millions of people worldwide. Why this desperate leap in the natural order of things?

Is the secret a religion?

The advocates of the secret claim it has nothing to do with religion, and that their theories have scientific basis.

So What does The Secret say about the Bible

The Secret book claims that “evidence and hints of the secret” have been passed down in all three major religions, even though it was not stated outright or spelled out in words. The writers even quote a verse from Matthew in the New Testament of the bible which they claim gives evidence of the Secret “if you ask for anything in My name, believing, you shall receive it”. In other words, they put their own unique spin on the bible. They extract what they feel is convenient, or how they feel things should be, and discard the rest of it.

Related: Convenient ignorance: Taking part and leaving part.

The Secret: What does the Bible Say?

There are quite a number of bible verses which support the teachings of the secret. The bible tells us that God is a God who reveals secrets. It mentions that “the desire of the righteous will be granted, and the fear of the wicked will come upon him”.

During his tribulations, Job lamented that “the thing which I have feared has come upon me”, and in Proverbs we’re told that “Pride comes before destruction”, supporting the teachings of the “secret” that our state of mind play a major role in what takes place in our lives.

But while there is some degree of truth in “The Secret”, we as Christians know that any attempt to substitute God with a “belief system” will ultimately fail, and, as Jim Reeves so aptly put it, “it is no secret what God can do”.

With the rising number of people reading and not being able to apply The Secret to any significant impact in their lives, I would suggest the following sequels to the Secret: